Acoustic panel covered with art or picture

Hi tommy, welcome.

I don't know of any companies that will do art on grill cloth. Maybe you can check out fiver to see if you can commission some. Somebody else might chime in.

The reflection 'points' are more like areas. The more area you can cover, the less reflections you'll get.

For side panels, and only for RFZ, 4" would be better since they'll be effective to 125Hz which is generally where stereo information becomes relevant. I'd argue that if your wife gets the dresser and you don't get ceiling panels, you should be able to make your side panels as thick as you want. Give and take!

For my 2 cents I'd add that for side reflection panels, as long as you're at it and can get away with it, thicker is better and spacing off the wall is better too. The reason is simply more LF performance. If you can only use 2" thick panels flush to the wall, that will work too but you loose out on the opportunity of greater absorption bandwidth.

The same goes for spacing off the wall (up to equal the material thickness). If you can only space 1" instead of 4", it's better than Zero. Your idea of building 1x6 frames and leaving a space at the rear is good. Also, cutting holes or slots in the frame will expose the sides of the absorbing material so as long as the covering material wraps around the sides, the holes will be invisible.

From a visual standpoint, some thin covering material can be somewhat transparent so painting the frames black (or a matching color) can help hide the light wood color. If you need to hide the color of the insulation, I have found using economy (the cheapest) landscape fabric good for muting the color bleed through of the insulation if you need it.

As for the 32" height off the floor: In a "perfect world" your RFZ panel would be centered on the line of sight reflection point using the "Mirror trick". It sounds like your panels will be a little on the high side but they should be effective.

Now that brings up the subject of elevations, your room height is 8'4" that's 100 inches, how convenient! So the 38% (or 62%) "rule" applies to height too. That means your optimum listening height would be 38" or 62". I have to say, with 8' (or thereabout) ceiling height, it really never works out for the best and we have to work with what we have. I think having a thick cloud helps to tame the floor to ceiling mode as well as the reflection, too bad you can't have one.

My ears sitting in my office are 45" off the floor so in my office, that's 47%, almost as bad as you can get...but if I had a 10' ceiling 38% happens to be 45.6" just about perfect!  But in my "studio" I have a standing mix station with speakers centered at 59" high and a really high "drafting" chair that gets my ears up to 59" off the floor if I want to sit. In truth, the standing workstation was designed because I mainly use it with my full band and running back and forth setting up levels and either leaning over or pulling up a chair was really annoying so I "jacked-up" the whole workstation so I could stand but then I had to get a tall chair when I wanted to mix (that I need to use a step stool to climb onto it:( I do have a 4" cloud too.

Make sure the paint isn't reflective.

4" panels flush are better.

Not because flush is better but because 4" is thicker and will give you a wider bandwidth on the low end (one octave). If you spaced the 4" panel 4" off the wall, you'd get even more LF performance (one more octave).

In practice, the 2" spaced 2" off the wall is almost as good as 4" flush... but the 4" flush is better.

Also, as I mentioned before, don't forget cutting holes or slots in the frame will expose the sides of the absorbing material increasing the panel effectiveness. If the covering material wraps around the sides, the holes will be invisible.

Hexpa, you rascal! Good suggestion. As it is evolving, the 6'x 4' x 4" panels will be mounted flush to the side walls and hopefully cover the first reflection points of both speakers on each side.  They will be covered with art by Woodshed Stage Art (WoodshedStageArt.com). It is a dye process on what is essentially grill cloth and retains acoustic transparency. They build large panels for touring bands for their stages. About $200 for each 4x6, but I can pick the art or photograph. On one wall, the panel will be flanked by two bookshelves filled with books of random heights and depths to act as diffusers and to hide the depth of that panel. Underneath that panel will be a pull out bench to sit on to play guitar and also to help hide the depth of that panel. Parallel on the opposite wall will be a 24" high x 60" wide set of drawers for guests to keep the wife happy. For my corner bass traps 24 x 24 x 31 to the ceiling I am trying to match the grey wall paint to make them disappear. Two more 2x4x4" panels flush on the front wall behind the speakers. Speakers set as close to the front wall/panels to minimize SBIF.  Speakers are Yamaha HS7's.  Then 2 movable 2x4x4" panels to store in the closet and use as needed.

Does this plan sound like it will work?

Here's more on diffusion if you have not see not this yet. At 7 minutes, Ethan talks about bookcases pretty much like Hexspa described and later he does an audio demo comparing diffusors, bookcase, etc: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb30CICG68c&list=RDCMUCGIr92yrDW4cRLD-QaZmS6w

Here's another video demoing diffusors etc.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB8H0HFMylo

That's great. But for reflections, the cloud is not centered directly above the mix position but a little forward at the reflection points from the speakers (the mirror trick). But in reality, depending on the speaker distance and the size of the cloud, it may end up being over the mix position...at least to some degree.

Then there's the ceiling fan; great for moving the air and probably not a big deal when mixing but when I tune a piano in a room with a ceiling fan, I always make sure it's off. It's weird, but sometimes it can make individual notes warble a tiny bit sounding like when two notes are slightly out of tune. If you don't turn off the fan, it can drive you crazy:)

If you don't really use the fan much, they're usually pretty easy to take down. They can be fairly easy to relocate a few feet back too, especially if the joists run in the same direction that you're moving it.